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First Published:
Oct 1997, 360 pages
Paperback:
Jan 1999, 406 pages
This book illuminates the meaning of guilt and innocence in America today. A vivid, revealing achievement.
This is the story of the Trial of the Century as only Dominick Dunne can write it. Told from the point of view of one of Dunne's most familiar fictional characters - Gus Bailey - Another City, Not My Own tells how Gus, the movers and shakers of Los Angeles, and the city itself are drawn into the vortex of the O.J. Simpson trial.
We have met Gus Bailey in previous novels by Dominick Dunne. He is a writer and journalist, father of a murdered child, and chronicler of justice-served or denied-as it relates to the rich and famous. Now back in Los Angeles, a city that once adored him and later shunned him, Gus is caught up in what soon becomes a national obsession. Using real names and places, Dunne interweaves the story of the trial with the personal trials Gus endures as he faces his own mortality.
By day, Gus is at the courthouse, the confidant of the Goldman and Simpson families, the lawyers, the journalists, the hangers-on, even the judge; at night he is the honored guest at the most dazzling gatherings in town as everyone-from Kirk Douglas to Heidi Fleiss, from Elizabeth Taylor to Nancy Reagan-delights in the latest news from the corridors of the courthouse.
Another City, Not My Own does what no other book on this sensational case has been able to do because of Dominick Dunne's unique ability to probe the sensibilities of participants and observers. This book illuminates the meaning of guilt and innocence in America today. A vivid, revealing achievement, Another City, Not My Own is Dominick Dunne at his best.
Yes, yes, it's true. The conscientious reporter sets aside his personal views when reporting events and tries to emulate the detachment of a camera lens, all opinions held in harness, but the man with whom this narrative deals did not adhere to this dictum, at least when it came to the subject of murder, a subject with which he had had a personal involvement in the past. Consequently, his reportage was rebuked in certain quarters of both the journalistic and the legal professions, which was a matter of indifference to him. He never hesitated to speak up and point out, in print or on television, that his reportage on matters of murder was cheered by much larger numbers in other quarters. "Walk down Madison Avenue with me and see for yourself how often I am stopped by total strangers," he said in reply to a hate letter he received from an enraged man who wrote that he had vilified O.J. Simpson "through the pages of your pretentious magazine for two and a half years."
His name, as ...
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